Saki's children often leave the adults in disarray.  Equally disconcerting to the unwitting or overbearing adult is the role of the supernatural in Saki's stories and it is almost certain that his frequent use of this device is because he actively enjoyed writing about it.  It might well have had the effect of immediately transporting him, as it does the reader, to a fantastical, legendary world in which to be eternally young and mischievous, and free from the censorious limitations of an adult-dominated life, is perfectly and perpetually possible.

Before discussing Saki's use of the supernatural or indeed identifying those stories in that category it may be useful to consider the role of the supernatural in the literature of the day.  From earliest times, ghosts, magic and creatures with uncanny powers have permeated folk literature and legends.  To the traditional elements of horror and fantasy in folklore, or in the Gothic romances so popular in the early part of the nineteenth century,¹ was added, in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, a new interest in scientific knowledge - of the animal kingdom, of anatomy and medical research, and of mechanical invention.  In Saki's day the current vogue for realism as applied to the grotesque or uncanny was greatly enhanced by the use of scientific detail to lend a bogus authenticity.

Darwin's theory of evolution had radically challenged religious beliefs and shocked man into a new awareness of the fundamental laws of nature.  From this there developed an interest in the workings of the human mind and the formation of such bodies as The Society for Psychical Research, psychical and psychological being virtually interchangeable terms at the time.  Not only was man pushing back the frontiers of the mind, at the same time he was making rapid and dramatic strides in the area of scientific discovery.  The Eighteen Seventies, for instance, saw the earliest recorded experiments in telepathy, conducted in 1871 by Henry Sidgwick, and the first telephone exhibited in 1876 at the Philadelphia Exhibition - an illustration of the divergent forms which scientific experiment was taking.  Within the next two decades the petrol engine was invented and the history of aviation was in its infancy, 1903 bringing the first flight by the Wright brothers and 1909 the first channel crossing by Bleriot.  Not only was the world becoming smaller and more accessible because of the development of communications, but a new quest for truth and understanding was all pervasive.

The range of material called into play in the supernatural fiction of the day was enormous: Mary Shelley's man-made monster in Frankenstein (1818); the chemical experiments leading to the dual personality in Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886); H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr Moreau with its grafting of human traits on to animals and its anti-vivisectionist propaganda; his futuristic space adventures - for instance, The War of the Worlds (1898) about Martian invasion.  To this may be added, among many others too numerous to mention, Conan Doyle's interest in Spiritualism and his tales of the supernatural, in particular The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902);² the fairy lore of Wilde and Barrie and Andrew Lang; Pan in Kipling and Barrie and others;³ Hardy's recurrent interest in witchcraft and folklore and Hawthorne's frequent use of psychic research.  In fact the eminence and varied professions of members of The Society for Psychical research as listed by Hynes in The Edwardian Turn of Mind illustrate the extent of such interest.⁴  The climate then was right for the fiction writer to exploit the extensive range of supernatural themes at his disposal, and the possibilities for a writer of Saki's imagination would be almost boundless.  Against this background then it is perhaps surprising that he should have limited himself in his use of the supernatural; including merely witchcraft, ghosts, Pan, talking animals, metempsychosis, werewolves, second sight, the pathetic fallacy and Hell.  (Fleeting reference to mesmerism is made in "The She-Wolf" and "The Seventh Pullet").

In identifying Saki's short stories of the supernatural a useful list is given in The Guide to Supernatural Fiction.⁵ Most of the stories listed will be dealt with individually later in this chapter, with the additions and deletions as listed in footnote 5.  What is noteworthy then is how Saki has chosen to limit his range.  The clue to why he has done so may be found in the stories themselves and in particular in one sentence in "The Peace of Mowsle Barton" (p.189): "When once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless", or in other words, if applied to story-telling, the employment of the supernatural is another device (like the superior wisdom of the child, or the practical joke) to shock his characters into awareness of vices and hypocrisies or bring enlightenment in some way.  As Dorothy Scarborough puts it: "Satiric supernaturalism is employed to drive hone many truths, to puncture conceits of all kinds".⁶

Figures in a landscape

Of the eighteen stories in the supernatural category⁷ exactly half are set in the countryside: five of them on a farm, two of them in rural retreats and the remaining two somewhere in the wilds of eastern Europe.  Common to a11 of them is the feeling of a "savage wildness"⁸ (p.161) that underlies the calm surface order of things, the feeling of a brooding fate that is not to be denied, and the sense of man's insignificance and the brief span of his allotted time against the timelessness of Nature.

The headstrong woman (like the aunt in "The Lumber-Room" and the cousin in "Sredni Vashtar") and the feeble man (like Octavian Ruttle in "The Penance") again figure in these tales, and it may be convenient to divide these rural stories of the supernatural into those which feature the wilfully blind or domineering and the weak-willed or unsuspecting.  Notable in the former category are "The Music on the Hill" and "The Holy War" where arrogance is punished by death; "The Interlopers" and "The Wolves of Cernogratz", set in the wilds of Eastern Europe, where wilful blindness is rewarded in the one case by death and in the other by extreme discomfiture; and "The Cobweb" in which tragedy strikes a young couple who have inherited a farm and in seeking to impose their modern ways are as carelessly dispossessed.

The second group (that is, the gullible or weak-willed) comprises "Gabriel-Ernest", the story of a were-wolf, in which the unimaginative and unthinking Van Cheele much resembles Octavian Ruttle; "The Peace of Mowsle Barton", a story of witchcraft which causes Crefton Lockyer to flee headlong from the less-than-peaceful countryside; "The Hounds of Fate", in which Martin Stoner through his sloth and lack of foresight incurs the fate of the man whom he is impersonating; and "The Pond", in which Mona who seems destined for a tragic end receives a last minute reprieve.  As Otto expresses it,⁹ the Nietzschean concept of the "unwomanly woman" and the "unmanly man" is once more a strong factor in each of these stories, and, as a general rule, the more unwomanly or domineering the woman and the more unheroic the man, the more severe the fate incurred.

In "The Holy War",¹⁰ the most extreme example of this abhorrently domineering type is portrayed by Thirza Yealmton, of whose character an early warning is given: "Thirza Yealmton was what is known as a managing woman" (L.p.288).  True to type, she interferes where interference is unnecessary, informing her husband, Bevil Yealmton,¹¹ on his return from a two-year sojourn in "Asiatic Russia" (L.p.287) to take possession of a property which he has loved since childhood, that "'you will find a lot of improvements since you last saw the place'" (L.p.289).  "It had never crossed his mind that any improvement could be desirable in the wonderland that he remembered" (L.p.289), but Thirza is oblivious of this as she itemises the changes she has made: in draining the pond because "'it made things damp and looked untidy'" (L.p.289); in getting rid of the "strutting, gorgon-hued game fowl" (L.p.289) for "a monotonous colony of white Leghorns" (L.p.289) which lay well.  Obsessed as she is with practical issues and as insensitive as she is mercenary, she "did not see the look that came into his eyes" (L.  p.289).  She is, however, "chilled and offended" (L.p.290) by his tone as he points out "'we are not poor'" (L.p.290) when confronted by the "serried rows" (L.p.289) of fruit trees which have replaced the orchard he had loved and which was a favourite nesting place for goldfinches.  Not in the least contrite, she "promptly decided on a four days' headache" (L.p.290) in self-righteous response to his further displeasure.

His patience is finally exhausted when he learns that Thirza has authorised the shooting of the wood owls because she thinks they make "'such a dismal noise'" (L.p.291), a view which could not be further from the almost mystical feeling that Bevil has for them: "'All the way across Europe I've been longing to hear those owls singing Vespers'" (L.p.290).  The vehemence of his reaction is akin to that of Conradin when Mrs De Ropp gets rid of his pet hen.  "'Is there any other vile thing that you have done in this dear old place?'" Bevil asks (L.p.291), adding prophetically, "'Something dreadful must surely happen to you!'" (L.p.291).¹²  Significantly, Thirza is more deeply offended than ever but still convinced of the rectitude of her actions, each piece of dialogue illustrating the ever-widening gulf between her and Bevil.

He does his best to restore things to their former perfection and "while these things were being done Yealmton and his wife waged a politely reticent warfare [...] a struggle which Thirza knew she must ultimately win, because she was fighting for existence".  "What she did not know, or did not understand, was that Yealmton was fighting a Holy War, and therefore could not be defeated" (L.p.291).  Clearly then this is a fight to the death.  This wilful blindness on her part leads inexorably to the day when she decides to prevent the children from skating on the pond: "'They've been warned not to go on the ice, and I mean to see that they don't'" (L.p.292), the tone of this again reminiscent of Mrs De Ropp when she says of Conradin: ""it is not good for him to be pottering down there in all weathers'" (p.138).  In so doing she is attacked by a wounded wild swan and falls through the ice to her death, a fate very similar to the Sheep in the story of that name and befalling a similarly foolish and stubborn character.¹³

The theme of this story is the sacrilegious behaviour of Thirza whose "arranging and interfering and supervising were a necessary condition of her well-being" (L.p.291), and while the supernatural element is less explicit than in some of the other tales, there is the sense of a powerful force at work.  The manner of her death happening at the same moment as Bevil's "involuntary prophecy: [...] 'Something dreadful must surely happen to you'" (L.p.292) recalls Conradin watching the shed door and invoking his prayer again.¹⁴  It is fitting that it should be a bird that is the cause of her death since the sacrificing of birds has figured so largely in the improvements she has made, and doubly ironic that the bird "wounded by some gunner [...] and harbouring among the reeds till it should die " has "strength enough left to do - what it had done" (L.p.292).  In this respect it is like the stag in "The Music on the Hill" which kills Sylvia but is itself doomed.

In Sylvia's case it is the wilful disregard of Pan which is the cause of her downfall.  Sylvia Seltoun who, "notwithstanding her name, was accustomed to nothing much more sylvan than 'leafy Kensington'" (p.161) and is "scarcely pugnacious by temperament, but belonged to that more successful class of fighters who are pugnacious by circumstance" (p.161) has "brought her hardest and certainly her most important struggle to a successful issue" (p.161).  This victory is in marrying "'Dead Mortimer'[...] in the teeth of the cold hostility of his family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to women" (p.161).  There are clearly several good reasons why 'Dead Mortimer' is not a good choice of husband, but her determination to have her own way has blinded her to everything but her ambition to marry him.

Added to this is her desire to prise him away from London despite his mother's cryptic and paradoxical warning: "'You will never get Mortimer to go [...] but if he once goes he'll stay; Yessney throws almost as much a spell over him as Town does'" (p.161).  The spell that London casts over him giving rise to "'the Jermyn-Street-look' in his eyes" (p.161) is very different from the spell cast by Yessney, and it is not long before even the insensitive Sylvia is moved to remark to her husband, "'One could almost think that in such a place the worship of Pan had never quite died out'" (p.162), to which Mortimer replies, "'The worship of Pan never has died out'" (p.162).  Like Mrs De Ropp, "Sylvia was religious in an honest, vaguely devotional kind of way" (p.162)¹⁵ and her response is predictable.  "'You don't really believe in Pan?'" (p.162).  Mortimer warns her quietly, "'I've been a fool in most things [...] but I'm not such a fool as not to believe in Pan when I'm down here.  And if you're wise you won't disbelieve in him too boastfully while you're in his country'" (p.162).  The warning note is struck just as in "The Holy War" when Thirza should have taken note of Bevil's displeasure and modified her behaviour but, like Thirza, Sylvia can only see her own point of view.  Despite the "sense of furtive watchful hostility" (p.162), the restless and hostile behaviour of the animals, her feeling "that if she had come across any human beings in this wilderness of barn and byre they would have fled wraith-like from her gaze" (p.163) and "the echo of a boy's laughter, golden and equivocal" (p.163) when there is no presence to account for it, she is scornful of Mortimer's warnings.

When she comes upon "a stone pedestal surmounted by a small bronze figure of a youthful Pan" (p.163), she feels "contemptuous annoyance" (p.163) on seeing the tribute of grapes which "were none too plentiful at the manor house" (p.163).  As with Thirza this mercenary attitude clouds her judgement.  As she snatches up the grapes she is startled by a "sudden apparition" (p.163) of a "boy's face [...] scowling at her, brown and beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes" (p.163) - a vision which is remarkably like the werewolf-boy in "Gabriel-Ernest" - and drops the grapes as she flees.

Her manner in discussing the incident with Mortimer later is arrogant and dismissive, while he is uncommunicative and detached, again the dialogue shedding light on the divergence between husband and wife as in "The Holy War".  She supposes the boy was "'a gipsy lad'" (p.164) to which Mortimer replies, "'A reasonable theory [...] only there aren't any gipsies in these parts at present'" (p.164).  Her reaction to the votive offering of grapes is very revealing, showing how concerned she is with appearances and how in her arrogance she has still completely failed to heed all these sinister warnings.  "'I suppose it was your doing [...] it's a harmless piece of lunacy, but people would think you dreadfully silly if they knew of it'" (p.164).  Mortimer's interest is sharpened immediately: "'Did you meddle with it in any way?'" (p.164) and his response: "'I don't think you were wise to do that [...] I've heard it said that the Wood Gods are rather horrible to those who molest them'" (p.164)¹⁶ is chilling in the same way as Bevil's remark to Thirza: "'Is there any other vile thing you have done?'" (L.p.291).

Sylvia remains defiant, however: "' Horrible perhaps to those that believe in them, but you see I don't'" (p.164).  And this is her downfall, this smug arrogance and wilful blindness.  Mortimer warns her to "'avoid the woods and orchards [...] and give a wide berth to the horned beasts on the farm'" (p.164) and even though she considers "it was all nonsense, of course [...] in that lonely wood-girt spot nonsense seemed able to rear a bastard brood of uneasiness" (p.164).  This makes her say, "'I think we will go back to Town some time soon'" (p.164), a decision which reveals that "her victory had not been so complete as she had supposed; it had carried her on to ground that she was already anxious to quit" (p.164), in which respect she closely resembles Crefton Lockyer in "The Peace of Mowsle Barton".  But it is already too late for her as Mortimer with his superior knowledge predicts: "'I don't think you will ever go back to Town'" (p.164), a note which resembles Bevil's warning, "'Something dreadful must surely happen to you'" (L.p.291).  While "he seemed to be paraphrasing his mother's prediction as to himself" (p.164) the sinister undertone is obvious.

On her walk next day Sylvia notes "with dissatisfaction and some self-contempt" (p.164) that she is taking Mortimer's advice and avoiding the woods and horned beasts.  The animals are restive and "a low, fitful piping, as of some reedy flute, was coming from the depth of a neighbouring copse, and there seemed to be some subtle connection between the animal's restless pacing and the wild music from the wood" (p.165).  She becomes aware of a stag being chased by hounds, which, instead of making for "the red deer's favoured sanctuary, the sea [...] turned his head to the upland slope and came lumbering resolutely onward over the heather" (p.165).

Sylvia thinks, "'It will be dreadful [...] the hounds will pull him down under my very eyes'" but the "music of the pack seemed to have died away [...] and in its place she heard again that wild piping [...] as though urging the failing stag to a final effort" (p.165).  The irony is plain to see, only Sylvia being unaware of what the final effort is to be.  "The pipe music shrilled suddenly around her" and "in an instant her pity for the hunted animal was changed to wild terror at her own danger" (p.165).  At last "in a flash of numbing fear" (p.165) she remembers Mortimer's warning about the horned beasts and realises that the Pan pipes are luring the stag towards her.  Her fear changes to "a quick throb of joy [when] she saw that she was not alone" (pp.165-66), but this is the final irony since it is the figure of Pan himself whom she perceives at the moment of death when "the acrid smell of the hunted animal was in her nostrils" (p.166), the hunted animal referring both to the stag and to Sylvia herself.  And "her eyes were filled with the horror of something she saw other than her oncoming death" (p.166) - the ultimate truth that the Wood Gods do exist, that Pan is real and that as ever 'God is not mocked'.  Like Mrs De Ropp, Thirza Yealmton and the rest she has paid the ultimate penalty for this hubris and Pan has exacted his tribute.¹⁷

This same ironical moment of truth is implicit also in the ending of "The Interlopers", the story of a senseless feud set "somewhere on the eastern spurs of the Carpathians" (p.447), when after three generations of enmity which had turned a "neighbour feud [...] into a personal one since Ulrich [von Gradwitz] had come to be head of his family" (p.447), he finally confronts his sworn enemy, "Georg Znaeym, the inheritor of the quarrel" (p.447).  Their fault lies not so much in the feud itself which "might, perhaps, have died down or been compromised if the personal ill-will of the two men had not stood in the way" (p.477), as in this element of petty malice.  "As boys they had thirsted for one another's blood" (p.477) which may be understandable at that age but "as men each prayed that misfortune might fall on the other" (p.477).

This prayer is answered unexpectedly and with fitting irony in the moment of the first and only meeting of the two men.  Ulrich in patrolling the forest has been separated from his men.  "If only on this wild night, in this dark, lone spot, he might come across Georg Znaeym, man to man, with none to witness - that was the wish that was uppermost in his thoughts" (p.448).  His unspoken wish is granted in the instant.  But at the moment of confrontation an unexpected problem arises: "a man who has been brought up under the code of a restraining civilization cannot easily nerve himself to shoot down his neighbour in cold blood and without word spoken" (p.448).  The failure to anticipate this difficulty shows a fatal lack of perception and in this "moment of hesitation [...] a deed of Nature's own violence overwhelmed them both" (p.448).  Before they can take evasive action "a mass of falling beech tree had thundered down on them" (p.448),¹⁸ Nature replying with swift and sure irony and with even-handed dispassion to each man's prayer for evil to befall the other.

Ulrich is both glad to be alive and exasperated at being trapped and gives tongue to both emotions, which evokes a childish, gibing response from Georg: "'So you're not killed, as you ought to be [...] Ho, what a jest, Ulrich von Gradwitz snared in his stolen forest'" (p.449).  Ulrich, equally childish, retorts, "'I'm caught in my own forest-land [...] When my men come to release us you will wish [...] you were in a better plight than caught poaching on a neighbour's land'" (p.449), the whole tenor of the dialogue throughout encapsulating the petty childishness of the feud.  The taunting continues back and forth while Ulrich frees his arm sufficiently to reach his wine-flask and having drunk some of the "Heaven-sent draught" (p.450) (an ironic observation since his present predicament may be said to be "Heaven-sent" while his own forethought has provided the flask) is moved by "something like a throb of pity [for] his enemy [...] just keeping the groans of pain and weariness from crossing his lips" (p.450).

He offers his flask to Georg, saying, "'One may as well be as comfortable as one can.  Let us drink, even if tonight one of us dies'" (p.450).  Already he has shown a sense of pity and philosophical acceptance, an acknowledgement that Georg is a man as well as an enemy; but initially Georg rejects the overture with the defiant assertion, "'I don't drink wine with an enemy'" (p.450) though perhaps it is equally because he "'can scarcely see anything; there is so much blood caked round my eyes'" (p.450).  But in "the pain and languor that Ulrich himself was feeling the old fierce hatred seemed to be dying down" (p.450) and he continues, "'Lying here, tonight, thinking'" (which is something that clearly it has taken this extremity to bring about) "'I've come to think we've been rather fools; there are better things in life than getting the better of a boundary dispute'" (p.450).  Considering that this has been his sole purpose in life this is a major admission.  He proposes, "'Neighbour, if you will help me to bury the old quarrel I - I will ask you to be my friend'" (p.450).

This child-like offer is met with a similarly immature response from Georg: "'How the whole region would stare and gabble if we rode into the market-square together'" (p.450).  That is his first thought, followed immediately by the more important one: "'If we choose to make peace among our people there is none other to interfere, no interlopers from outside'" (p.450).  The advantages are occurring to him thick and fast as he contemplates the social implications: "'You would come and keep the Sylvester night beneath my roof, and I would come and feast on some high day at your castle'" (p.450), revealing a mind that is only concerned with superficial things.  Just as Ulrich has ignored or misread the signs of disturbance in the "roebuck [...] running like driven things" (p.447) and the "unrest among the creatures that were wont to sleep through the dark hours" (p.448), Georg has reckoned without the fact that Nature and the forest have already judged them once, that Sylvester Night (New Year's Eve) is more than a mere festivity, it is the pagan worship accorded to a powerful deity.

In their newfound friendship they carelessly tempt fate again.  "Each prayed a private prayer that his men might be the first to arrive, so that he might be the first to show honourable attention to the enemy that had become a friend" (p.451).  But this prayer with its element of self-centred pride is a prayer that cannot be answered impartially and Supernature answers it as impersonally and cruelly as in the moment of their being trapped by the tree.  They raise "their voices in a prolonged hunting call" (p.451) in unison for the first and last time, and their call is answered, but instead of summoning help, they call down on themselves their ultimate fate - summed up in the last word of the story: "'Wolves'" (p.452).  Significantly it is Ulrich who sees them and tells Georg.  He has been the prime mover throughout, extending his flask and the hand of friendship.  Georg asks, "'Who are they?' [...] straining his eyes to see what the other would gladly not have seen" (p.452).  As with Sylvia, what is revealed to them is too late to be of any use and they suffer the same moment of brief joy before the awful truth.

Wolves and death in conjunction figure also in "The Wolves of Cernogratz", though in a mourning rather than a predatory role.  In this story it is the snobbery and false values of the nouveau riche Gruebel family which is exposed by the supernatural element.¹⁹  The scene is a castle once belonging to the Cernogratz family and now owned by the mercenary and "eminently practical" (p.410) Baron and Baroness Gruebel, the Baroness being the dominant figure and the Baron, like Egbert in "The Reticence of Lady Anne" or Mr Quabarl in "The Schartz-Metterklume Method", a pale imitation.  "The one poetically-dispositioned member" of the family, "a prosperous Hamburg merchant" (p.410) is the Baroness's brother Conrad who wants to know if there are "'any old legends attached to the castle'" (p.410).  In typically scornful fashion, the "Baroness Gruebel shrugged her plump shoulders", saying, "'There are always legends hanging about these old places.  They are not difficult to invent and they cost nothing'" (p.410).  Already she has revealed the two salient features of her character; that she is mercenary and has no time for nor sense of the mysterious, imaginative side of life.

In relating the "story that when any one dies in the castle all the dogs [...] and the wild beasts in the forest howl the night long" (p.410) she adds, "'It would not be pleasant to listen to'" (p.410); and to Conrad's contradiction that "'It would be weird and romantic'" (p.410), she replies "complacently", "'Anyhow, it isn't true'" (p.410), as adept at shifting her ground in debate as the aunt in "The Lumber-Room" or Mrs De Ropp in "Sredni Vashtar".  She says that she has "'had proof that nothing of the sort happens'" (p.410) (the dogmatic tone is obvious).  "'When the old mother-in-law died [...] we all listened, but there was no howling'" (p.410), and again underlines her preoccupation with material things by adding, "'It is just a story that lends dignity to the place without costing anything'" (p.410).

To her great surprise "Amalie, the grey old governess" who "was wont to sit silent and prim and faded in her place" (p.410) (the implication being that she knows it is her place to be thus self-effacing) flatly contradicts her.  "'The story is not as you have told it'".  She continues, "rapidly and nervously, looking straight in front of her and seeming to address no one in particular" (p.410), almost as if describing a vision, "'It is not when any one dies in the castle that the howling is heard.  It was when one of the Cernogratz family died here that the wolves came from far and near and howled at the edge of the forest just before the death hour'" (pp.410-11).  At the moment of death furthermore "'as the soul of the dying one left its body a tree would crash down in the park'" (p.411) and she concludes with "a note of defiance, almost of contempt, in her voice" (p.411), "'But for a stranger dying here, of course no wolf would howl and no tree would fall.  Oh, no'" (p.411).  This is also ironic since, in their lack of compassion and preoccupation with material wealth, the Gruebels could be said to have no souls to lose at the point of death.

The "well-fed, much-too-well-dressed" (p.411) Baroness is outraged and sneers, "'You seem to know quite a lot about the von Cernogratz legends, Fraulein Schmidt'" (p.411), but the shaft falls wide of the mark for the governess replies, "'I am a von Cernogratz myself [...] that is why I know the family history'" (p.411).  An embarrassed silence follows until after the governess has left when the Baron, "his protruding eyes taking on a scandalized expression" (p.411) expostulates, "'She almost told us we were nobodies, and I don't believe a word of it'" (p.412), his infelicity of phrasing revealing a subtle irony, since in everyone's eyes but their own and those with the same values, they are precisely nobodies in the sense in which they mean.  The Baroness adds indignantly, "'She knows she will soon be past work and she wants to appeal to our sympathies'" (p.412).  Only Conrad believes Amalie because "being of an imaginative disposition" (p.412) "he had seen tears in the old woman's eyes when she spoke of guarding her memories" (p.412).²⁰

Despite the Baroness's callous decision to "'give her notice to go as soon as the New Year festivities are over [...] till then I shall be too busy to manage without her'" (p.412), she is thwarted by Amalie's falling ill with what proves to be her last illness.  "'It is most provoking [...] I cannot remember that she was ever seriously ill, too ill to go about and do her work, I mean'" (p.412).  Her insensitivity is breathtaking as she adds perfunctorily, "'One is sorry for her, of course, she looks so withered and shrunken'" (p.412) - again it is appearances that are important.  The banker's wife agrees that it is "'most annoying [and that] it is the intense cold'" (p.412), and the Baron adds his cliché, "'The frost is the sharpest that has been known in December for many years'" (p.412).  These banal exchanges become even more important to them later as face-savers when Amalie dies, and the tree falls as predicted, since "'the intense cold that is splitting the trees'" (p.414) can be made to account for the otherwise inconveniently unaccountable.

Wappi, the "small, woolly lapdog [which] had leapt suddenly down from its cushion and crept shivering under the sofa" (p.412) is clearly of the household for it does not join in the "outburst of angry barking [...] from the dogs in the castle-yard, and other dogs [which] could be heard yapping and barking in the distance" (p.413).²¹  But it is a very clear sign of supernatural forces at work and parallels the restiveness of the animals in "The Music on the Hill" and the fleeing of the deer in "The Interlopers".  To this noise is added "all the starved, cold misery of a frozen world, all the relentless hunger-fury of the wild, blended with other forlorn and haunting melodies to which one could give no name" (p.413), summed up by the Baron in one word (as at the end of "The Interlopers"): "'Wolves!'" (p.413) and by the Baroness as "'that terrible howling!'" (p.414).  It is certainly unpleasant for the Gruebels, underlining as it does the truth of all that Amalie has said.  The Baroness, seeking to deny the miraculous in relating it to something which she can understand and value, says, "'not for much money would I have such death-music'" (p.414), the stress of the moment revealed in the very Germanic word order.  As Conrad perceptively points out, "'That music is not to be bought for any amount of money'" (p.414), an observation which might be said to sum up the lesson to be learnt by the Gruebels.

While eagerly agreeing with the suggestion that everything surrounding Amalie's death can be put down to natural causes, it is a telling irony that in the obituary they should announce: "'On December 29th, at Schloss Cernogratz, Amalie von Cernogratz, for many years the valued friend of Baron and Baroness Gruebel'" (p.414), their ability to make capital out of a situation triumphant to the last.  If they have been momentarily discomposed by the supernatural events they have successfully masked from themselves a more than temporary sense of unease, their natures so insensitive that they are beyond redemption.²²

A tree in an elemental role features in "The Interlopers" and "The Wolves of Cernogratz", it is a tree again which seals the fate of the Ladbruks in "The Cobweb", a tale set on a farm and again with the feeling of man's insignificance in the scheme of things.  The timelessness of the farm and its ways is emphasised from the very first with the date of baptism of old Martha Crale "ninety-four years ago" (p.266).  "For longer than any one could remember she had pattered to and fro [...] grumbling and muttering and scolding, but working unceasingly" (p.267).²³  Emma Ladbruk, the young farmer's wife and the new mistress of the farm, is of as little consequence to the old woman as "a bee wandering in at a window on a summer's day" (p.267), presumably a minor irritant soon gone.  Martha "was so old and so much a part of the place, it was difficult to think of her exactly as a living thing." (p.267).  This then is the obstacle standing in Emma's way, preventing her from changing the window nook "to make it bright and cozy with chintz curtains and bowls of flowers" (p.2.66) instead of years of accumulated clutter.

She has been wont to tell her friends, "'When we are more settled I shall work wonders in the way of making the kitchen habitable'" (p.266), and in this respect she resembles Thirza Yealmton in her making of 'improvements'.  But the "unspoken wish in those words" is "unconfessed as well as unspoken" (p.266), and she does not admit even to herself that she ill-wishes Martha.  "The musty farm parlour, looking out to a prim, cheerless garden imprisoned within high, blank walls" (p.266)²⁴ is not enough for Emma; not content to be mistress of the farm, she wishes also to be mistress of the kitchen.

As time goes by Emma "was uncomfortably conscious of another feeling towards the old woman.  She was a quaint old tradition [...] part and parcel of the farm itself [...] at once pathetic and picturesque - but she was dreadfully in the way" (p.268).  The arrogant dismissal of the old woman's worth in every sense is clear.  Emma is a modern young woman who is "full of plans for little reforms and improvements" (p.268) (the busy quality of the "bee" in evidence here); she has "the latest science of dead-poultry dressing at her fingertips" (p.268) and can hardly bear to see old Martha trussing "the chickens for the market-stall as she had trussed them for nearly fourscore years - all leg and no breast" (p.268).  Instead of letting the old woman continue as she has done for all of her long life and turning her attention to other matters, Emma allows herself to dwell on "the coveted window corner" (p.268).  "For all her nominal authority [she] would not have dared or cared to displace" (p.268) the objects which clutter it; "over them seemed to be spun the protection of something that was like a human cobweb" (p.268), and plainly Martha would need to be swept away with the clutter.

Any sympathy that the reader might be tempted to feel for Emma is lessened by the shift of focus onto the old woman, who in her reminiscing and muttering as she works is given more reality than Emma, whose fault is not in actual meddling but in the "unworthy meanness" of wishing "to see the span of that brave old life shortened by a few paltry months" (p.268).  One day, however, Emma feels "a qualm of self-reproach" (p.268)²⁵ when she finds Martha "huddled in a shrunken bunch on the window seat, looking out with her dim old eyes as though she saw something stranger than the autumn landscape" (p.269), a description which calls to mind Amalie in "The Wolves of Cernogratz." Martha in seeing into the future has knowledge denied to Emma and it is fitting that the window seat so coveted by Emma should be her chosen place to rest at the moment of revelation.  "'Tis death, 'tis death a-coming,'" (p.269) she says and lists all the portents that forewarned her, such as the dog howling, the screech-owl giving "'the death-cry [...] something white as run across the yard yesterday [...] Ay, there's been warnings.  I knew it were a-coming'" (p.269).²⁶

Emma, blinded by her "unspoken wish" (p.266), jumps to the not-unnatural conclusion that it is Martha's own death which she foresees and "hastened away to get assistance and counsel.  Her husband, she knew, was down at a tree-felling some little distance off" (p.269) so that the first person she comes upon is her cousin "young Mr Jim [...] who divided his time between amateur horse-dealing, rabbit-shooting, and flirting with the farm maids" (p.269).

When told by Emma that "'old Martha is dying'" (p.269), he replies, "'Nonsense [...] Martha means to live to a hundred.  She told me so, and she'll do it.'" Emma feels "contempt for the slowness and dulness of the young man" (p.269), but he has more instinctive understanding than she does.  She is discomfited to see Martha "in the middle of a mob of poultry scattering handfuls of grain around her" (p.270).  The old woman's temporary weakness in the instant of supernatural knowledge has left her and she is working as usual.  The bitter irony is that the death she has foretold is that of Emma's husband, "'young Mister Ladbruk'" who "'run out of the way of a tree that was coming down an' ran hisself on to an iron post'" (p.270).  In coming "into the farm by way of inheritance" (p.266) he has clearly been as little attuned to its ways and with as little due reverence as his wife.

"The rabbit-shooting cousin as the next-of-kin" (p.270) in his turn now inherits the property and "Emma Ladbruk drifted out of its history as a bee that had wandered in at an open window might flit its way out again" (p.270).  Widowed, homeless and of no consequence, Emma has been bitterly dealt with by a fate which seems disproportionately intolerant of a young woman who appears to have sinned only in wanting to be mistress of her kitchen.  This sense of insignificance is intensified for Emma as "into her mind came the thought that for months, perhaps for years, long after she had been utterly forgotten, a white, unheeding face would be seen peering out through those latticed panes" (p.270).  This much she has learned too late, a knowledge which her carefree cousin has had all along.  In seeking to impose her will she has paid the penalty for overlooking the reverence due to an old woman attuned to the ways of the countryside and the knowledge which comes of experience, and is superior to the untried theory of modern science.²⁷

In each of these stories, the supernatural element seems to function in the same way as the practical joke or the child logic, to shock characters into awareness or, in extreme cases, to act as a kind of divine retribution for the sin of hubris.  Despite warnings and opportunities for changing a course of action these wilfully blind rush headlong to their fate.  This same theme occurs also in "The Hounds of Fate" where it is not arrogance so much as "a natural slothfulness and improvidence" (p.193) which cause Martin Stoner's downfall.²⁸  His inadequacy is stressed repeatedly in such phrases as "hopelessness had numbed his brain", "scarcely summon sufficient energy", "mental torpor", "his mind almost a blank" (p.193) and so on throughout the ensuing pages.

Initially the reader's sympathy is engaged for the plight of Stoner who is likened to "a hard-pressed stag [...] in its last extremity" (p.193) reminiscent of the stag in "The Music on the Hill".  "in his case the hounds of Fate were certainly pressing him with unrelenting insistence" (p.193), but it is not long before it is made clear that "desperation had not awakened in him any dormant reserve of energy; on the contrary, a mental torpor grew up round the crisis of his fortunes" (p.193), that is, he is a weak man who has brought his misfortune upon himself.  The point is driven home again and again that Stoner is self-centred and complacent.

In stumbling upon a farm-house which "looked chill and inhospitable" (p.193) but which turns out to be the reverse in the welcome he receives from "the withered-looking old man" (p.194) who opens the door to him, his luck seems to have changed at last.  He is mistaken for Tom Prike, who will inherit the farm when his aunt dies, an aunt who refuses to see him but does not deny him the right to live there despite the unspecified crime which has caused Tom to disappear four years earlier.  Just as Martin Stoner never learns the nature of this crime, so it is never disclosed to the reader, and in this respect it is like "The Penance" where the reader learns at the same rate and only as much as Octavian Ruttle.

At first in his hunger and weariness it is natural for Martin to be stunned by his good fortune and justified in feeling that "the hounds of Fate seemed to have checked for a brief moment" (p.195).  But he drifts on in this fashion, allowing decisions to be made for him, sinking deeper and deeper into a role which is more than convenient and much less than honest.  In taking his good fortune for granted he reveals not only an improvident but a selfish nature.  He is warned by the old man that "'you'll find the folk around here has hard and bitter minds towards you.  They hasn't forgotten nor forgiven'" (pp.195-96).  But in being offered the chance to ride which "was one of the pleasures dearest to his heart" (p.196), he considers that "there was some protection against immediate discovery of his imposture [because] none of Tom's aforetime companions were likely to favour him with a close inspection" (p.196).  The pleasure of the moment is obviously uppermost in his mind.  "The interloper" (p.196) which he knows himself to be "wondered vaguely what manner of misdeed the genuine Tom had committed to set the whole countryside against him" (p.196) and it is this fatal lack of moral fibre which is his undoing.  Not only is he dishonestly exploiting the situation for his own ends, but forethought might have warned him of the possible dangers to be incurred in adopting so hated an identity.

As he rides out, it becomes evident that "the likeness which had imposed²⁹ at close quarters on a doddering old man" (p.196) (presumably Stoner's assessment of George) "was good enough to mislead younger eyes at a short distance" (p.196).  This is borne out when at a later date he made "a furtive visit to the farm parlour in an endeavour to glean some fragmentary knowledge of the young man whose place he had usurped" (p.197) and comes upon a photograph of "a young man with a somewhat surly dare-devil expression [...] the likeness to himself was unmistakable" (p.197).  This provides the only clue to the sort of person Tom Prike is.

Stoner might have taken heed of the "ample evidence" (p.196) of the hatred Tom has incurred and the fact that "'Bowker's pup' [...] seemed the one element of friendliness in a hostile world" (p.196).  There is irony here too since, had 'Bowker', Tom's dog, still been alive Martin's imposture would have been discovered, and the fact that the "gaunt, elderly woman peering at him from behind the curtain of an upper window" (p.196)³⁰ who is "evidently [...] his aunt by adoption" (p.196)³¹ refuses to meet him face to face, helps also to preserve him from discovery.  He is aware that there are potential pitfalls: "the real Tom [...] might suddenly turn up" (pp.196-97) or "the false Tom might be called on to sign documents [...] or a relative might arrive who would not imitate the aunt's attitude of aloofness.  All these things would mean ignominious exposure" (p.197).  But he considers these risks preferable to the "alternatives [of] the open sky and the muddy lanes" (p.197).  As things turn out this is a bitter irony indeed.

"The only time in his life that he had made a rapid decision" (p.197) is whether to have his pork hot or cold, a measure of his fatally short-sighted and superficial approach to life.  But "as he gave the order he knew that he meant to stay" (p.197).  Despite the fact that he is impostor-heir to the farm, "he took part in the farm-work [...] as one who worked under orders and never initiated them" (p.197) - another indication of his inadequacy - thereby salving his conscience by doing "a certain amount of work in return for the hospitality to which he was so little entitled" (p.197).

But one day, inevitably, his luck runs out and "old George" warns him that "'Michael Ley is back in the village, an' he swears to shoot you'" (p.198).  Typically Stoner stammers, "'But where am I to go?'" (p.198), leaving his fate to be decided by others, in this case a "doddering old man" as Martin has dismissively described him.  Stoner without the excuse of age is inferior to old George.  He is furnished with money and instructions which make Martin feel "more of a cheat than ever as he stole away that night [...] with the old woman's money in his pocket" (p.198) but not enough to prevent him from taking further advantage.  "He felt a throb of compunction" (p.198), evidence of one fleeting moment of genuine feeling "for those two humble friends who would wait wistfully for his return" (p.199).³²  As ever he is indulging himself with false sentiments instead of concentrating on his best course of action.  He allows his mind to linger over the possibilities of their reactions if "the real Tom would come back" (p.199) and Saki's irony has never been more bitter.  "For his own fate he felt no immediate anxiety [...] Fortune had done him a whimsically kind turn [...] There was a sense of relief in regaining once more his lost identity and ceasing to be the uneasy ghost of another" (p.199).  The irony here is twofold since he is about to become "an uneasy ghost" in his own right.  But in this sense of relief he is fatally disarmed³³ and totally unprepared when Michael Ley "stepped out from the shadow of an overhanging oak tree [...]³⁴ with a gun" (p.199).  "His white set face revealed a glare of human hate such as Stoner [...] had never seen before" (p.199).³⁵

Too late he sees the danger, but "The hounds of Fate had waited for him in those narrow lanes, and this time they were not to be denied" (p.199).  Like Sylvia and Thirza and Emma, he has had several opportunities to change his destiny but he has failed to heed the warnings.  Unlike them it is lack of will rather than wilfulness that is his undoing - he is one of the weak men so abhorrent to Saki.  In allowing his life to be ruled by others it is a fitting irony that he has also incurred the fate earned by the man whose character he has assumed and of whose crime he has no knowledge but pays full forfeit in his dual ignorance.³⁶

An inability to face up to reality is the theme of "The Peace of Mowsle Barton" also, though in this case with comic rather than tragic effect.  As the story opens in a farmyard setting yet again, "Crefton Lockyer sat at his ease, an ease alike of body and soul [...] after the stress and noise of long years of city life" (p.184).  As impressionable as he is unquestioning of appearances he is a ripe candidate for Saki's favourite trick of jolting the unsuspecting and complacent into an unwelcome awareness of reality, in this case by the introduction of witchcraft into this rural idyll.  The sense of timelessness is all-pervasive as in "The Cobweb": "Time and space seemed to lose their meaning and their abruptness" (p.184).  "Sleepy-looking hens and solemn preoccupied ducks were equally at home in yard, orchard, or roadway [...] even the gates were not necessarily to be found on their hinges" (p.184).  The deft wittiness of description takes nothing away from the sense of peace that this order brings to Crefton, so recently escaped from the London rat race, but it does convey a sense of the slightly ridiculous element common to Octavian Ruttle, Van Cheele and others of the unthinking sort.

"Over the whole scene brooded the sense of a peace that had almost a quality of magic in it" (p.184) and Crefton "decided that here was the life-anchorage that his mind had so fondly pictured and that latterly his tired and jarred senses had so often pined for" (p.184).  In wanting to believe that he has found the perfect haven, he blinds himself to the reality.  "He would make a permanent lodging-place among these simple friendly people [...] falling in as much as possible with their manner of living" (p.184).  Unlike Emma in "The Cobweb" he has no arrogant wish to impose his ways on time-honoured traditions and to this extent his punishment is lighter.  But he is guilty of judging superficially, his naive assumption that these are "simple friendly people" soon to be radically challenged together with his wish to fall in "as much as possible with their manner of living".  While Martin Stoner reveals an underlying arrogance in his judgement of Old George as "doddering", Crefton shows an optimistic and kindly disposition which is akin to that of Octavian Ruttle.

No sooner has he made this decision than the first intimation of discord is introduced in the form of "an elderly woman" (p.185) who "spoke in a dull impersonal manner" (p.185).  "Her eyes, however, looked impatiently over Crefton's head" (p.185).  Clearly there is more to her than first appearances would suggest.  His tact is called upon at once as she obliges him to read out a message inscribed on a barn door to the effect that "'Martha Pillamon is an old witch'" (p.185).  He fears that she might turn out to be Martha in person since "the gaunt, withered old dame at his side might certainly fulfil local conditions as to the outward aspect of a witch" (p.185).  There is a delicious irony here, because while she is not Martha she is in fact a witch.

Muttering "'It's true, every word of it [...] Martha Pillamon is an old witch'" (p.185) she hobbles off to be replaced with startling immediacy by "another old crone [...] evidently in a high state of displeasure.  Obviously this was Martha Pillamon in person" (p.185).  The interesting fact here is that while Crefton is correct this time in his assumption of the latest old crone's identity he is still reluctant to believe in witchcraft until much later - unable or unwilling to accept the evidence as it presents itself.

"'Tis lies, 'tis sinful lies'" avers Martha, "'tis Betsy Croot is the old witch'" (p.185) and adds in comic contradiction, "'I'll put a spell on 'em, the old nuisances'" (p.185).  Crefton shows a certain ability to think quickly in interpreting the message on the door as "'vote for Soarker' [...] with the craven boldness of the practised peacemaker" (p.186).  But "somehow a good deal of the peace seemed to have slipped out of the atmosphere" (p.186), already disillusion has begun its insidious process.  Matters continue to deteriorate as he discovers when he reaches the farm kitchen where Mrs Spurfield greets him with the news, "'The kettle won't boil'" (p.186) "'It's been there more than an hour an' boil it won't [...] we're bewitched'" (p.186).  Crefton tries to persuade them and himself "'it must boil in time'" (p.186), but inexorably Mrs Spurfield insists that it will not, and adds, "'I suppose you'll be leaving us now things have turned up uncomfortable [...] there are folks as deserts one as soon as trouble comes'" (p.186).  Although "Crefton hurriedly disclaimed any immediate change of plans" (p.187), she is later proved correct in this prediction.  He perseveres in trying to find a rational explanation for the kettle's refusal to boil, even buying a spirit-lamp kettle but when that also fails "he felt that he had come suddenly into contact with some unguessed-at and very evil aspect of hidden forces" (p.187).  The fact that Martha and Betsy have called each other witches and that Betsy has threatened to cast a spell is not something he is prepared to face as yet - "the hidden forces" are still "unguessed-at".

Still hoping to "recapture the comfortable sense of peacefulness" (p.187) he goes for a walk and comes upon further disquieting evidence of witchcraft, this time when on having heard Betsy Croot muttering to herself "'let un sink as swims'" (p.187), a succession of ducks launch themselves on to the water of a pond and unaccountably drown while "Crefton gazed with something like horror" (p.188).  At this moment "Martha Pillamon, of sinister reputation " (p.188) (he is beginning to believe the truth about her) shrieks "in a shrill note of quavering rage: 'Tis Betsy Croot adone it, the old rat.  I'll put a spell on her'" (p.189).

This proves too much for the nervous Crefton who "knew that he was giving way to absurd fancies, but the behaviour of the spirit-lamp kettle and the subsequent scene at the pond had considerably unnerved him" (p.189).  He has discovered to his consternation that "when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless" (p.189).  The following morning all the other signs of supernatural forces at work are obvious now to "his sharpened senses" (p.189): cows are "huddled" together, poultry are "querulous", the yard pump is "ominously silent" (p.189).  Despite overhearing Mrs Spurfield complaining, "'He'll go away, for sure [...] there are those as runs away [...] as soon as real misfortune shows itself" (p.190), on this occasion, "Crefton felt that he probably was one of 'those' and that there were moments when it was advisable to be true to type" (p.190).

His eyes opened to reality at last, Crefton leaves behind the farm over which "brooded that air of magic possession which Crefton had once mistaken for peace" (p.190).  When considered alongside his first impression of the farmyard over which "brooded the sense of a peace that had almost a quality of magic in it" (p.184) it can be seen how far Crefton's perceptions have changed.  Peace, it appears, is, after all, a state of mind as he returns to "the bustle and roar of Paddington Station [which] smote on his ears with a welcome protective greeting" (p.190).  Ironically the first person to greet him, described with deliberate ambiguity as "a fellow-traveller" (p.190), trots out a favourite cliché: "'Very bad for our nerves, all this rush and hurry [...] give me the peace and quiet of the country'" (p.190).  But Crefton knows better, though it takes the improbability of witchcraft to open his eyes.

This unwillingness to admit to the seemingly impossible despite a series of almost unmistakeable signs and portents is apparent also in "Gabriel-Ernest", the story of a werewolf who hunts by night and inhabits the body of a youth during the daytime.  As in the previous story, the tone is light and, while there is an element of the macabre, essentially comic in effect.  Van Cheele's main failing is that he thinks too little and talks too much, a fact which is both explicitly stated ("talked incessantly" (p.63), "found himself engaged in the novel process of thinking before he spoke" (p.64), "contrary to his usual wont, did not feel disposed to be communicative" (p.66) and Van Cheele "did not stop for anything as futile as thought" (p.68), for example) and implicitly in the exchanges with Cunningham and Gabriel-Ernest himself.

Van Cheele fancies himself as a man of science, a view backed up by his domineering aunt but with little evidence to support it.  What he lacks is imagination unlike the perceptive artist who opens the story by remarking, "'There is a wild beast in your woods'" (p.63).  Instantly dismissing it as an impossibility it is not till later that Van Cheele thinks to ask Cunningham, "'What did you mean about a wild beast?'" (p.63).  Cunningham, however, is reticent: "'Nothing.  My imagination'" (p.63).  At the end of the story the reason for his reluctance to say more is explained.  "'My mother died of some brain trouble [...] so you will understand why I am averse to dwelling on anything of an impossibly fantastic nature that I may see or think that I have seen'" (p.68).  Cunningham then has every reason to doubt what he has seen though he knows both that he has an imagination and that he has seen something quite extraordinary.  By contrast Van Cheele has no imagination whatsoever and even when confronted with incontrovertible evidence refuses to believe what he sees because it does not fit in with his theories of what is possible.³⁷

Cunningham has only seen at a distance a naked boy vanishing with the dying sun and "'on the open hillside where the boy had been standing a second ago [...] a large wolf, blackish in colour, with gleaming fangs and cruel, yellow eyes'" (p.68).  Van Cheele on the other hand has conversed with the werewolf-boy on two occasions at close quarters.  On the first occasion all sorts of hints are dropped: he lives "'here, in these woods'" (p.64), he doesn't "'sleep at night; that's my busiest time'" (p.64), he feeds on "'flesh' [...] and he pronounced the word with slow relish, as though he were tasting it" (p.64), "'it's quite two months since I tasted child-flesh'" (p.65).  He continues, "'at night I hunt on four feet [...] I don't fancy any dog would be very anxious for my company'" (p.65).³⁸

The more flustered Van Cheele becomes, the more he blusters: "'I can't have you staying in these woods,' he declared authoritatively" (p.65), to which the boy disconcertingly replies, "'I fancy you'd rather have me here than in your house'" (p.65).  And this is no idle threat since in due course he turns up as naked as before in Van Cheele's morning room.  "As a parish councillor and justice of the peace" (p.66) Van Cheele is very conscious of his position and in remembering "that uncanny remark about childflesh eaten two months ago" (p.66) feels that "such dreadful things should not be said even in fun" (p.66), a sentiment that brings to mind the old saw: 'many a true word is spoken in jest'.  As a consequence "at dinner that night he was quite unusually silent" (p.66), a circumstance which causes his aunt to remark with telling irony, "'One would think you had seen a wolf'" (p.66).

The following morning his sense of disquiet persuades him to visit Cunningham in search of enlightenment and "with this resolution taken, his usual cheerfulness partially returned, and he hummed a bright little melody" (p.66).  This mood of complacency is rudely shattered, however, by the presence in his morning room of "the boy of the woods.  He was drier than when Van Cheele had last seen him, but no other alteration was noticeable in his toilet" (p.67).  Van Cheele's immediate concern is to cover up for him in every sense, concealing his nakedness beneath the Morning Post³⁹ and explaining to his aunt that he "'has lost his way - and lost his memory'" (p.67).  In hoping that the boy was not "going to add inconvenient candour to his other savage propensities" (p.67), the ironic inversion draws attention to the false values of polite society and is a neat antithesis of the ironic reference to Van Cheele's 'learning' on p.64 where the "hearers [...] felt that he was being absolutely frank with them".

An amusing dialogue ensues with the aunt in typically dogmatic fashion organising clothes and an identity for him.  "'We must call him something till we know who he really is [...] Gabriel-Ernest, I think; those are nice suitable names'" (p.67).  She quite clearly sees nothing strange about him, blinder even than Van Cheele, though "his staid and elderly spaniel had bolted out of the house at the first incoming of the boy" (p.67), a clear indication of supernatural presence and reminiscent of Wappi in "The Wolves of Cernogratz".  Still, however, Van Cheele is not sufficiently convinced of what he suspects and he hares off by train to consult Cunningham, leaving Gabriel-Ernest to "help her [his aunt] to entertain the infant members of her Sunday- school class at tea that afternoon" (p.68), the wisdom of which should have been doubtful even to an idiot like Van Cheele.

On having his worst suspicions confirmed "he dismissed the idea of a telegram.  'Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf was a hopelessly inadequate effort at conveying the situation" (p.68).  The picture of him "tearing at top speed towards the station" (p.68) recalls the picture of Octavian Ruttle chasing the children towards the pigsty, at last prodded into direct action.  It is, of course, too late by the time he reaches home to discover that Gabriel-Ernest has been entrusted to take "'the little Toop child home [...] It was getting so late, I thought it wasn't safe to let it go back alone'" (p.69), as his aunt informs him, the irony being that the child -"it"- would have been safer on its own than with Gabriel-Ernest.  Van Cheele "at a speed for which he was scarcely geared [...] raced along the narrow lane that led to the home of the Toops" (p.69), his eyes opened at last to the reality of the situation.  "Nothing was ever seen again of the Toop child or Gabriel-Ernest" (p.69), but it is assumed from the evidence of "the latter's discarded garments" (p.69) that he has drowned in an attempt to save the child.  Like the mother of the gardener's boy in "The Elk",⁴⁰ "Mrs Toop, who had eleven other children, was decently resigned to her bereavement" (p.69), but Miss Van Cheele erects a "memorial brass [...] to 'Gabriel-Ernest, an unknown boy, who bravely sacrificed his life for another'" (p.69).

This last is too much for Van Cheele, and "he flatly refused to subscribe to the Gabriel-Ernest memorial" though he "gave way to his aunt in most things" (p.69).  While Van Cheele learns the truth too late, at any rate to save the child,⁴¹ his aunt never learns the truth at all, and remains in a state of sublime ignorance while "sincerely" mourning "her lost foundling" (p.69).  It is a bitter indictment of her inability to judge character that the wicked werewolf boy should so completely deceive her while the innocent Toop child, a member of her Sunday school class, should never progress beyond the status of 'it'.  Even Van Cheele has been able to discern something uncanny about the boy from the first encounter.

If lack of imagination is responsible for what happens in "Gabriel-Ernest" it could be said that in "The Pond", the opposite is the case.  Mona, the reader is told, "had always regarded herself as cast for the tragic role" (L.p.281), and this weakness for self-dramatisation blinds her to the truth and leads her again and again to the pond where she toys with the idea of suicide.  "In marrying John Waddacombe, Mona had mated herself with a man who shared none of her intimacy with the shadowy tragedies of what she called the half-seen world" (L.p.281).  Unlike the other characters in this chapter so far, she is too inclined to believe in the supernatural and this distorts her perception of reality.

John could hardly be more down to earth, concerned as he is with "potato blight, swine fever" (L.p.281) and other such unromantic practicalities.  He "was of the loam, loamy" (L.p.282).  "The tragic discovery" (L.p.282) made by Mona within days of her wedding that she and John are mismatched was obvious to all but her.  "John was fond of her in his own way, and she, in her quite different way, was more than a little fond of him" (L.p.282)⁴² but they speak a different language and "while John was busy and moderately happy with his farm troubles, Mona was dull, unoccupied, and immoderately unhappy with her own trouble" (L.p.282).  During one of "her moody, listless rambles [...] she came across the pond" (L.p.282).  The fact that "standing water was a rarity" in the "high chalky soil" (L.p.282) and that apart from "the artificially made duck-pond [ .  .  .  ] and one or two cattle pools, Mona knew of no other for miles around" (L.pp.282-83), provide the clues to what finally happens.

It is "overspread with gloomy yews [...] was not a cheerful spot" and "the only human suggestion that could arise in connection with the pool was the idea of a dead body floating on its surface" (L.p.283), the supernatural element being present in the atmosphere and her imagination.  As time goes by Mona's obsession with the pond increases, "with its suggestion of illimitable depths" (L.p.283), and increasingly it is herself whom she imagines floating, Ophelia-like, "with the daylight and moonlight reaching down to her through the overarching catafalque of yew and beech" (L.p.283).  The idea of suicide appeals to her more and more strongly and "there seemed a spirit lurking in its depths and smiling on its surface that beckoned her to lean further and yet further over its edge" (L.p.283).

And then providentially, "John Waddacombe, hearty as an ox, and seemingly proof against weather exposure, fell suddenly and critically ill with a lung attack" (L.p.284).  It is as if Fate has deliberately intervened to prevent her tragedy, for she discovers in nursing him that he is "far more loveable and sympathetic" and "husband and wife found that they had more in common than they had once thought possible" (L.p.284).  Mona puts all thoughts of suicide from her, but "the morbid undercurrent" (L.p.284) of her nature draws her to revisit the pond and as she "peered down at the dark, ugly pool" she shudders to think of "an end so horrible as choking and gasping to death in those foul, stagnant depths" (L.p.285).  She has moved closer to reality in this imagining of her death as something horrible instead of her former romanticised picture of it, although as events show she is still blind to the reality of the pond.

Ironically just at the moment of this revelation of the grotesque nature of drowning "the thing that she recoiled from in disgust seemed to rise up towards her as though to drag her down in a long-deferred embrace" (L.p.285).  She loses her footing and falls to what she imagines to be her doom through endless moments in which she has time to perceive her true feeling for "John whom she loved with all her heart" (L.p.285).  This ending seems unutterably cruel and it is with relief that the reader learns of Mona's second reprieve since the pond has been discovered to be "'only about an inch and a half deep'" (L.p.286).

Apart from a brief exchange in the first paragraph where a fortune-teller had hinted, "'You will marry the man of your choice, but afterwards you will pass through strange fires'" (L.p.281), a prediction which turns out to be true enough in the manner of such generalisations, the only dialogue throughout occurs in the last paragraph.  And this conversation between John and Mona marks a change in mood and tempo from the slow, brooding, melancholy narrative, evocative of Mona's mood, to a light and direct exchange which better than any description illustrates how Mona has learnt to relate to her husband on his own terms.  When she appears, covered in mud, and explains that she has "'slipped into a pond'" (L.p.285), John is astonished.

"'I didn't know there was such a thing for miles around'" (L.p.286).  Mona admits the truth by saying, "'Well, perhaps it would be an exaggeration to call it a pond'" (L.p.286).  Even though there is "a faint trace of resentment in her voice" (L.p.286), she has learnt completely the nature of reality.  In this comic, undignified picture of her, covered in mud and literally brought down to earth, Mona might aptly be described as "of the loam, loamy" (L.p.282) like her husband and this resolution is as neat as only Saki could devise.

While it is true that the inexorability of fate is certainly present throughout these tales, the dispute about free will and determinism remains largely unresolved.  In some cases where the central character is faced with death there is the feeling that no matter what happens they are doomed, "The Interlopers" being the prime example of this.⁴³  Yet in "The Hounds of Fate" as with most others, at every stage there are choices to be made, other courses to be pursued, and it is clearly the central character who has inflicted his fate upon himself.  If in "The Cobweb", for instance there is a feeling that Emma has never had much chance, that some of her feelings may be understandable and that she has been punished out of all proportion to her crime, this is very much an exception to Saki's norm where retribution is usually very much in keeping with and in strict proportion to the enormity of the misdeed.  It could be argued that even in "The Interlopers" the episode as described in the story is the final act of an ongoing saga most of which has been enacted 'offstage' and that the previous scenes leading to this inevitable denouement have contained all the opportunities for making other decisions and choosing another fate.  Certainly, much of this may be deduced from the description of the characters, and their childish attitudes to each other.  Perhaps Saki's standpoint may be most readily seen in "The Pond" where Mona's obviously fatalistic view of life is mocked in no uncertain terms.

Of the remaining nine stories in the supernatural category, two are political satires: "The Infernal Parliament" which in tone and treatment has more affinity with the early "Alice" sketches than with most of the later short stories, and "'Ministers of Grace'" where the political personalities of the day, easily identifiable under such pseudonyms as Quinston, Kedzon and Lord Hugo Sizzle, for instance,⁴⁴ are substituted by angels and the character of the original absorbed by an animal or bird.  It is worthy of note that the perpetrator of these angel substitutions, the young Duke of Scaw, is attacked and killed by a swan (the same fate as befalls Thirza in "The Holy War") which has assimilated the character of Kedzon.  The Duke, in claiming "'it's not every one who would have the knowledge or the power necessary'" (p.216), cannot be allowed as a human tampering with the supernatural to escape unscathed but in his assumption of superhuman powers pays the penalty for hubris.

A similar fate and for similar reasons overtakes Cornelius Appin in what is probably the most famous of Saki's tales of the supernatural: "Tobermory".  In teaching that naturally superior animal, the cat, to talk, he looses on the house party a disconcerting witness to all manner of social misdemeanours.  "A narrow ornamental balustrade ran in front of most of the bedroom windows at the Towers, and it was recalled with dismay that this had formed a favourite promenade for Tobermory at all hours" (p.112).  In order to prevent embarrassing disclosures it is resolved by the house guests to kill the talking cat and when Appin protests, "'But my great discovery! [...] after all my years of research and experiment -'" (p.113), he is told uncompromisingly by Mrs Cornett, "'You can go and experiment on the shorthorns at the farm [...] or the elephants at the Zoological Gardens [...] they have this recommendation, that they don't come creeping about our bedrooms and under chairs, and so forth'" (p.113).

From being the family pet, Tobermory is suddenly an outcast and, in revealing the hypocrisies of the house-party and scratching below the thin veneer of cordiality and politesse, shows not only that he is superior to the human being but also that he knows it.  In answering Mavis Pellington's question about his views on her intelligence, he exposes Lady Blemley's hypocrisy by saying, "'Sir Wilfrid protested that you were the most brainless woman of his acquaintance'" and "'Lady Blemley replied that [...] you were the only person she could think of who might be idiotic enough to buy their old car.  You know, the one they call 'The Envy of Sisyphus' because it goes quite nicely up-hill if you push it'" (p.111).  Since that very morning Lady Blemley had indeed suggested to Mavis that she buy the car in question Lady Blemley is unmasked as two-faced.  Tobermory is not only intelligent he is clearly well-educated too.

But it is Major Barfield who with elephantine subtlety "plunged in heavily to effect a diversion.  'How about your carryings-on with the tortoise-shell puss up at the stables, eh?'" (p.111).  The consternation is general and while Tobermory displays a delicacy unknown to the Major in replying, "'One does not usually discuss these matters in public [...] I should imagine you'd find it inconvenient if I were to shift the conversation on to your own little affairs'" (p.111), the threat is implicit.  The cat continues to enlighten the guests about matters best left hidden, recounting conversations overheard and revealing the duplicity and hypocrisy of the guests - employing just the kind of "inconvenient candour " dreaded by Van Cheele in his morning-room confrontation with Gabriel-Ernest.  Despite these uncomfortable revelations the guests are united in their decision to destroy the cat as their common enemy, but they are cheated of this satisfaction by the Rectory Tom who has killed him "in unequal combat" (p.115), presumably over the tortoise-shell puss.  Lady Blemley instead of rejoicing at their deliverance takes the opportunity "to write an extremely nasty letter to the Rectory about the loss of her valuable pet" (p.115).  As with the Gruebels in "The Wolves of Cernogratz" hypocritical habits are too deeply ingrained, are in fact too necessary to the fabric of their society, to suffer more than a temporary interruption by supernatural events.

And the man behind the "Beyond-cat" (p.109), obviously foolish enough to take Mrs Cornett's advice, is killed by "an elephant in the Dresden Zoological Garden, which had shown no previous signs of irritability" (p.115).  While they get his first name right, "the victim's name was variously reported in the papers as Oppin and Eppelin" (p.115); and thus was the instigator of the most astonishing discovery consigned to oblivion.  As Clovis sardonically observes, "'If he was trying German irregular verbs on the poor beast [...] he deserved all he got'" (p.115).  Cornelius may have been instrumental in teaching Tobermory to speak but in so doing he is merely the tool of some higher power in "the domain of miracle" (p.109), which has life and death in its gift.  In claiming for himself "'my great discovery'" (p.113) he is guilty of hubris and pays the ultimate penalty.

Social pretensions and hypocrisy are also the subjects of "The Hedgehog" which starts off at a vicarage garden party where "for the past five-and-twenty years at least mixed doubles of young people had done exactly the same thing on exactly the same spot at about the same time of year" (p.474).  As in "The Peace of Mowsle Barton" and "The Cobweb" there is a sense of timelessness in which "the young people changed [...] but very little else seemed to alter" (p.474).  Into this idyll is introduced the discordant element of the mutual enmity of Mrs Dole and Mrs Hatch-Mallard - a function similar to the old crones in "The Peace of Mowsle Barton" translated to a polite setting.  After an interlude of bitchy conversations like those of the "Reginald" sketches or The Watched Pot, full of deliberate misunderstandings and contradiction, the discussion, instigated by the peace-loving Mrs Norbury, moves on to ghosts.

A friend of hers, Ada Bleek, is coming to stay and being "'highly clairvoyante, a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter'" (p.476) and belonging "'to that Research Society, you know'" (p.476),⁴⁵ is hoping to see a ghost.  Mrs Dole immediately insists that she will "'see the unhappy Lady Cullumpton, the most famous of all the Exwood ghosts'" (p.476)⁴⁶ and goes on to tell how her ancestor, Sir Gervase Cullumpton, strangled his new bride, describing the event in gruesome detail and with matter-of-fact relish.  Not to be outdone Mrs Hatch-Mallard snobbishly and peremptorily dismisses that ghost as "'a trashy, traditional apparition [...] only vouched for by house-maids and tipsy stable-boys'" (p.476) whereas her "'uncle's ghost was seen by a Rural Dean, who was also a Justice of the Peace'" (p.477).⁴⁷

In the event Ada Bleek sees neither.  What she does see, is "'a huge white hedgehog with baleful yellow eyes'" and "'black, loathsome claws that clicked and scraped along the floor'" (p.478), these "baleful yellow eyes" calling to mind the "cruel yellow eyes" (p.68) of the werewolf in "Gabriel-Ernest".  In order to avoid insulting Mrs Hatch-Mallard whose house the Norburys are renting, "Hugo Norbury, who is not naturally a man of brilliant resource, had one of the really useful inspirations of his life" (p.478).  He pretends that they have played a practical joke on her.  Thus Ada Bleek is punished for her claims to be psychic, just as Mona in "The Pond" learns the dangers of dabbling in the occult.

It is a practical joke also that causes the pathologically mean Laploshka to die and begin the haunting of the narrator of "The Soul of Laploshka".  He is described as "one of the meanest men [...] and quite one of the most entertaining.  He said horrid things about other people in such a charming way [...] Hating anything in the way of ill-natured gossip ourselves, we are always grateful to those who do it for us" (p.72), it can be seen how easily he would have fitted in to the social circle in "Tobermory", for instance.  By tricking Laploshka into paying for a meal and thereby causing him to die of heart-failure, "there arose the problem of what to do with his two francs.  To have killed Laploshka was one thing; to have kept his beloved money would have argued a callousness of feeling of which I am not capable" (pp.73-74), this inversion of values reflecting the accepted norm for Saki's characters.  Added to Laploshka's legendary meanness is a further quirk: "a two-franc cigar would be cheerfully offered to a wealthy patron" (p.72) but he would go to extremes to avoid tipping a waiter or "a hard-up companion" (p.72).

The narrator thinks he has solved the problem of getting rid of the money when he puts it into the collecting-bag of "one of the most popular Paris churches [...] for 'the poor of Monsieur le Curé'" (p.74) because he has overheard someone say,"'They do not want money [...] they have no poor.  They are all pampered'" (p.74).  But then begins a series of visitations from Laploshka's reproachful ghost since "evidently the poor of Monsieur le Curé had been genuine poor" (p.74).  This haunting continues for some time until on another visit to the church - "it was probably Easter, for the crush was worse than ever" (p.75) as he cynically observes - he is able to retrieve the two francs when an English lady asks him to drop it in the collection bag for him.  "The delicate mission of bestowing the retrieved sum on the deserving rich still confronted me" (p.75) but this he ingeniously solves when, by "putting a strong American inflection into the French which I usually talked with an unmistakable British accent" (p.75)⁴⁸ he quizzes "Baron R., one of the wealthiest and most shabbily dressed men in Paris" (p.75) like an American tourist and then tips him the two francs.  The ironic fact that the Baron immediately puts it into a "small box fixed in the wall" marked "'Pour les pauvres de M. le Curé'" (p.76) does not matter since, "after all, the money had been given to the deserving rich, and the soul of Laploshka was at peace" (p.76).

This story then, using the device of an uneasy ghost, again exposes hypocrisy and snobbery and false values in general, a theme which also occurs in the early story, "The Image of the Lost Soul" (1891).  In this case "the fat blue pigeons that roosted and sunned themselves" (p.523) judge the stone figure "low down on the cold north side of the building" with its face "hard and bitter and downcast" to be "a demon" (p.523), though the "jackdaw, who was an authority on ecclesiastical architecture, said it was a lost soul" (p.523).

In this allegory a "sweet-voiced" (p.524) field-bird unable to find shelter "under the shade of a great angel-wing or to nestle in the sculptured folds of a kingly robe" (p.524) is protected by the "effigy of the Lost Soul".  In time "the folk in the verger's lodge" who, though poor, "understood the principles of political economy" (p.524), catch the bird and cage it.  Its song "came up to the parapets - a song of hunger and longing and hopelessness, a cry that could never be answered" (p.525) until "one day no song came up from the little wicker cage" (p.525) and the little bird having pined and died is thrown on to the rubbish heap.  After "the coldest day of the winter" (p.525) "there was a crackling sound in the night on the Cathedral roof" and "in the morning it was seen that the Figure of the Lost Soul had toppled [...] and lay now in a broken mass on the dust-heap" (p.525).

This is curiously like "The Wolves of Cernogratz" where the plump insensitive Baroness resembles the snobbish, complacent pigeons, and the tree falls at the moment of the soul's release - a phenomenon which might be explained by the severity of the frost.  The howling of the wolves: "all the starved, cold misery of a frozen world" (p.413) is like the captive bird's song as it pines away.  The pigeons and the pious saints in their superior stance, like the Gruebels, are clearly inferior in having no compassion and no souls to lose.

Another cathedral is the setting for "The Saint and the Goblin" which again features a stone image though in lighter vein.  At the outset "the Saint was a philanthropist in an old-fashioned way; he thought the world, as he saw it, was good, but might be improved" (p.70) whereas the Goblin "was of opinion that the world, as he knew it, was bad, but had better be let alone" (p.70).  In this unequal struggle between the unworldly idealist and the cynic, the Saint succumbs to temptation, encouraged by the knowing Goblin and discovers that "'after all, it's something to have the conscience of a goblin'" (p.72), having traded his anguished concern for the poor for a more comfortable hypocrisy.

If the Goblin is cynical he is more than matched by Laura in the story of that name, who in dying assumes various incarnations to jolt the stupid, unsuspecting and conventional Amanda out of her complacency.  It is through her dialogues with Laura, Sir Lulworth and her husband, Egbert, that the full extent of Amanda's ignorance is revealed together with a humourless literal-mindedness.  Ironically in her conversation with the dying Laura, who threatens to reincarnate variously as an otter and a Nubian boy, Amanda sighs, "'I wish you would be serious'" (p.243).  And then on Laura's death, she complains to Sir Lulworth about the inconvenient timing since, "'I've asked quite a lot of people down for golf and fishing, and the rhododendrons are just looking their best'" (p.243).  Sir Lulworth responds ironically, "Laura always was inconsiderate [...] she was born during Goodwood week, with an Ambassador staying in the house who hated babies" (p.243).⁴⁹

The dialogue continues with Amanda revealing that like Octavian Ruttle "she was one of those who shape their opinions rather readily from the standpoint of those around them" (p.243),⁵⁰ which is the reason that she is being punished by the appearance of the otter just as Laura has promised.  It is, however, appearances as ever which preoccupy the superficial Amanda, as she preposterously exclaims, "'I think she might at least have waited till the funeral was over'" (p.244) to which the Clovis-like Sir Lulworth replies, '"It's her own funeral, you know [...] it's a nice point in etiquette how far one ought to show respect to one's own mortal remains'" (p.244).  When the otter is killed, the description of the "human look in its eyes" (p.245) is too much for Amanda who can no longer hide the truth from herself although it is not until the little Nubian boy has put in an appearance that she becomes "seriously ill" (p.245).

Amanda is unable to think for herself and it is through metempsychosis that she is jolted out of her unquestioning complacency and into an awareness of the truth.  Like Octavian Ruttle, her character is easily moulded by those around her.  Carried one stage further is the extreme example of Groby Lington who in his "good-natured, kindly dispositioned" (p.224) way, takes on the characteristics of a succession of pets - the ultimate chameleon.  He does not even act in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience but "as an obedient concession to the more insistent but vicarious conscience of his brother" (p.224).  So empty then is he of a personality or will of his own, that a parrot in the first instance, then a monkey, which has killed the parrot, and finally, when the monkey has died, a tortoise, influence him so much that he assumes all their most salient characteristics.

It is not to be thought, however, that he is condemned to a miserable life, for as someone who "laughed good-naturedly and admitted to himself the cleverness" (p.225) of the caricature of him drawn by the children (who as ever show a superior perception), he deserves a better fate than that.  In assuming the characteristics of the monkey, he incurs the displeasure of his servants who lament the disappearance of a "cheerful, well-dispositioned body, who gave no particular trouble" (p.228),⁵¹ but has the fun of outraging the prim Miss Wepley by firing her cough sweets at her in church.  Worse than this is the episode concerning the half-naked figure of the plump stable-boy whose clothes have been thrown into a tree by the monkey while the boy is bathing.⁵²  Instead of rescuing them from the monkey, Groby tosses the boy bodily into a clump of nettles and goes off laughing maniacally.

But his finest hour arrives when the plump and self-important Leonard Spabbink, who in many respects resembles Waldo Plubley in "A Touch of Realism",⁵³ drives Groby to an extremity of rage by his snoring.  Groby, in trying to drown him in his bedroom, knocks over a candle which sets the room alight.  Still preoccupied with his savage intent to drown Spabbink he carries him to the pond in the garden and is hailed as a hero for saving him from the fire.⁵⁴  Spabbink's protests are ignored and Groby is awarded a medal.  Like Van Cheele's refusal to subscribe to Gabriel-Ernest's memorial, Spabbink declined "to attend the ceremonial presentation of the Royal Humane Society's life-saving medal" (p.230).  In the natural course of things the monkey dies and with it the unruly element of Groby's personality.  It is entirely appropriate that the story should end with "'Old Uncle Groby'" (p.231), as the children affectionately call him, pottering around the garden with his new pet tortoise, which is quite in character.

Thus it can be seen that at one extreme there is the domineering woman such as Thirza Yealmton in "The Holy War" who must be eliminated from a world which cannot contain her energetic interference, or Sylvia Seltoun who must be punished for denying the existence of something which she refuses to acknowledge; and at the other extreme, the protean Groby Lington whose personality is so formless that Supernature in abhorring a vacuum peoples him with the personality of his pets.

The Windows of the Soul

As in the previous chapter, the numerous references to "eyes" have great significance both in giving clues to underlying truths behind the careful facade and in stressing the distorted perception of the characters.  In "The Music on the Hill", for instance, the figure of the externally beautiful boy has "unutterably evil eyes" (p.163) and Gabriel-Ernest is variously described as "strange-eyed" (p.65) and with "those tigerish yellow eyes" (p.65).  The eyes of the ghost hedgehog are described as "baleful yellow eyes", "narrow, yellow eyes of indescribable evil" and "cruel, hideous eyes" (p.478), all very reminiscent of "those tigerish yellow eyes" of the werewolf-boy, and which on his changing into "a large wolf, blackish in colour, with gleaming fangs and cruel, yellow eyes" (p.68) bring to mind also "the unutterably evil eyes" of Pan.

The feeling that there is more to someone or something than 'meets the eye' is obvious also in the "'Jermyn-Street-look'" (p.161) in "'Dead Mortimer's'" eyes, a side of his character which proves preferable to the Pan-worshipper released by Sylvia when she insists that they leave Town for Yessney.  Again in "'Ministers of Grace'" there is the hint of unplumbed depths when "the young Duke said nothing, but his eyes shone with quiet exultation" (p.222).  Conflicting messages are again present when Ada Bleek "her eyes looking very tired, but ablaze with excitement" (p.477) recounts her vision of the ghostly hedgehog, the tiredness explained by her having spent half the night reading "Popple's County History" and the excitement in having realised her ambition to see a ghost.  The eyes again tell a different story in "The Peace of Mowsle Barton" when Betsy's eyes "looked impatiently over Crefton's head" (p.185) and Martha's "eye caught the chalk inscription" (p.186) revealing an awareness that has nothing to do with an ability to read.  Because "he had seen tears in the old woman's eyes" (p.412) Conrad believes the unlikely truth of Amalie's tale, and it is a pity for Thirza that she "did not see the look that came into his eyes" (L.p.289), or paid more heed to the fact that in Bevil's "eyes it had been a wonderful and desirable abode for mortal man" (L.p.287) and that the orchard which she has destroyed "made one's eyes ache with longing" (L.p.288).  Groby Lington likewise, if he had paid closer attention to the monkey, might have been warned by the "fitful red light in its eyes" (p.226).

The expressive quality of the eyes is clear in "Laploshka's reproachful eyes" (p.74) and "his eyes furtively⁵⁵ watching me" (p.75).  Mona's "large dark eyes" (L.p.281) are obviously soulful while "Mr Lington had his eyes closed" (p.227) not only in simulating innocent prayer but possibly in order to hide the expression in them.  "The darkling eyes" of the Lost Soul reveal hidden depths while contrasting poignantly with "the bright-eyed bird" (p.524), the hint of unshed tears in "bright-eyed" foretold by the great bell: "'after joy ...  sorrow'" (pp.524 and 525).  "Bulging eyes" denote a certain kind of character, usually someone preoccupied with material rather than spiritual or intellectual matters.  For instance, "Laploshka said nothing, but his eyes bulged a little" (p.73),"Belturbet saw, with bulging eyes" (p.216) the Duke of Scaw perform miracles of koepenicking⁵⁶ in "'Ministers of Grace'" and in "The Wolves of Cernogratz" the Baron's "protruding eyes" took on "a scandalized⁵⁷ expression" (p.411).

The nature of Emma's sin in "The Cobweb" is revealed when she "cast covetous eyes" (p.266) on the window nook, and while old Martha "looking out with her dim old eyes as though she saw something stranger than the autumn landscape" (p.269) is aware of what is important and real in this world and the next, "the young woman's eyes clouded with pity" (p.269), that facile sentimentality also clouding her judgement.  Sylvia in "The Music on the Hill" is similarly blind, even to the "intent unfriendly eyes" (p.162) of the dog and it is only at the moment of death that "her eyes were filled with the horror of something she saw other than her oncoming death" (p.166).  The fact that "Stoner had eyes for little else than the bed" (p.195), that "evidently the likeness [...] was good enough to mislead younger eyes at a short distance" (p.196) and that "his sanctuary became in his eyes a place of peace and contentment" (p.198) in the moment of his having to leave it, are powerful indications of the sort of person he is.  The blindness of "The Interlopers" is emphasised throughout: Georg "was nearly blinded with the blood which trickled across his eyes" (p.449), "'there is so much blood caked round my eyes'" (p.450), "'I can't see distinctly'" (p.451), until in the last moment of unwelcome revelation, "straining his eyes to see what the other would gladly not have seen" (p.452) - the unforeseen "interlopers" in the shape of wolves.

There are some who cannot be deceived, however, as the ironic observation that Groby Lington "had never been a hero in the eyes of his personal retainers" (p.228)⁵⁸ makes clear.  The Goblin too reveals his knowingness in "being too well bred to wink" (p.71) but it is Tobermory who is demonstrably superior in giving nothing away: "'he blinked at me in his usual way'" (p.110) says Sir Wilfrid, "his face white beneath its tan and his eyes dilated with excitement" (p.110) in sharp contrast to the cat's inscrutability.  Ada Bleek's reaction to a brush with the supernatural is immediately called to mind also.

Sound Effects

Apart from visual clues, inappropriate laughter is another common motif which warns of the sinister, of 'times out of joint' or that there is something stranger than is readily apparent.  In "Gabriel-Ernest", the werewolf boy "laughed a weird low laugh" (p.65), "pleasantly like a chuckle and disagreeably like a snarl" (p.65) and then later, "the boy laughed again, a laugh in which the snarl had nearly driven out the chuckle" (p.65).  Similarly disconcerting is the behaviour of the old crone in "The Peace of Mowsle Barton" who "would break off into a shrill laugh, with a note of malice in it that was not pleasant to hear" (p.187), but it is revealing in the same way as the expression in her eyes.  The "echo of a boy's laughter, golden and equivocal" (pp.163 and 166) discloses the true nature of Pan, his beautiful external appearance belying the evil within, visible in his eyes.

The "unrepentant chuckle" (p.242) that Laura emits is indicative of her true character, while in "The Infernal Parliament", "the Fiend, laughing unpleasantly" (p.554) acts perfectly consistently.  Martin Stoner "laughed mirthlessly" (p.195), and when invited to ride he "stammered [...] almost laughing" (p.195) that he had no suitable clothes to wear, these inept responses saying much about the weakness of his character.  The changing of Groby's personality from someone who "laughed good-naturedly" (p.225) - almost the only instance of laughter which is natural and appropriate in these stories of the supernatural - is marked by the "peal of shrill laughter from Groby" (p.229) performing his monkey tricks.  This hysterical sound finds an echo in the "idiotic chattering laugh of a man unstrung with hideous fear" (p.452) when Ulrich sees the wolves in "The Interlopers".  Earlier Georg has emitted a "short, snarling laugh" (p.449), and "he laughed again, mockingly and savagely" (p.449) - both of which strongly recall the laughter of Gabriel-Ernest and stress the almost subhuman status of Ulrich and Georg.  The "sardonic snort" of Mrs Hatch-Mallard in "The Hedgehog" (p.475) says much about her mirthless nature, while the "half-jeering, half-reproachful murmur" (L.p.284) of "The Pond" shows the conflicting undercurrents of Supernature, the seeming innocence and underlying malignity.

As Dorothy Scarborough points out, "inexplicable music forms one of the commonest elements of mystification in these romances",⁵⁹ though perhaps it is only in "The Music on the Hill" that the sinister supernatural role of music is employed - the Pan pipes luring the animals to hunt Sylvia and "the pipe music [which] shrilled suddenly around her" (p.165) adding to the frisson of fear.  The unearthly description of the baying of hounds as "the music of the pack" (p.165) is echoed in "The Wolves of Cernogratz" where the howling of the wolves is described as "haunting melodies" (p.413) adding to the poignancy of the story just like the birdsong in "The Image of the Lost Soul".

The music - church music - in "The Soul of Laploshka", however, serves a quite different purpose, that of showing the preoccupation of the fashionable with the trappings of religion rather than its spiritual significance.  In "Gabriel-Ernest" and "Tobermory" music plays a humorous role, in the former to underline Van Cheele's complacency as "he hummed a bright little melody" (p.66) just prior to the rude shock of the werewolf-boy's appearance in his morning room; and in the latter where the "lugubrious rendering of 'Mélisande in the Wood'" (p.114) highlights the hopeless attempts at observing social conventions while the murderous intentions against Tobermory predominate.

In general, then, it can be seen that all these recurrent elements combine to present a picture of conflicting messages, where what seems on the surface to be reasonable and credible masks a seething cauldron of improbable possibilities.  In the acceptance of the Impossible into the reckoning, the "Domain of Miracle" opens up a fantastic world where human values are reversed and the incredible acquires great plausibility.  Whether the device be witchcraft, metempsychosis or some other form of supernatural intervention, man with his follies and vanities is revealed in all his insignificance, eternally subordinate to this supernatural regime.

While it is certainly true that Saki has adopted some of the conventions of the supernatural genre of his day, notably in the sinister music in "The Music on the Hill", the behaviour of the dogs in "The Wolves of Cernogratz" and "Gabriel-Ernest", and of the animals in general in their restive awareness of an uncanny presence, his use of such devices is selective and idiosyncratic.  He remains true to disconcerting, inversionist type, the supernatural basically a powerful means of upsetting the conventionally-minded or overturning the accepted and unquestioned rules of a complacent and unsuspecting society.  Thus by taking "the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless".  Carried one step farther, it is tempting to believe that in this phrase there is a conscious echo of Sherlock Holmes's injunction to Dr Watson: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?⁶⁰

Notes

1. For an invaluable discussion of "The Gothic Romance" and the role of the supernatural in fiction in general see Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (New York and London: G.P.  Putnam's Sons, 1917).
2. Saki makes direct reference to this work in "The Romancers", p.280.
3. According to Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p.146, Peter Pan, first performed in 1904, was the most successful play of the year.  "Pan is a particularly omnipresent figure of the period".
4. Ibid., p.140: "Among its members and associates in its first year [1882] was Arthur Balfour, Leslie Stephen, John Ruskin, John Addington Symonds, the biologist A.R. Wallace, The Rev. C.L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury".  He goes on to say that Tennyson, William James, Freud and Jung, Andrew Lang and Henri Bergson were also contributing members over the years.
5. Everett F. Bleiler in The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983).  They are, in alphabetical order: "The Cobweb" (second-sight); "Gabriel-Ernest" (werewolf); "The Hedgehog" (ghost); "The Infernal Parliament" (Hell); "Laura" (metempsychosis); "'Ministers of Grace'" (angels); "The Music on the Hill" (Pan); "The Open Window" (ghosts); "The Peace of Mowsle Barton" (witchcraft); "The Remoulding of Groby Lington" (assuming animal characteristics); "The Saint and the Goblin" (pathetic fallacy); "The Seventh Pullet" (supernatural death); "The She-Wolf" (Transiberian magic); "The Soul of Laploshka" (ghost); "Sredni Vashtar" (prayers answered); "Tobermory" (talking animal) and "The Wolves of Cernogratz" (animals and nature mourn).  To these might be added : "The Interlopers" and "The Hounds of Fate" (a malign presence); "The Image of the Lost Soul" (pathetic fallacy); "The Pond" (brooding fate) and "The Holy War" (animal retribution); and the following deleted: "The Open Window", "The She-Wolf" and "The Seventh Pullet" as belonging perhaps more naturally with the other stories in the chapter entitled "The Realms of Fiction", while "Sredni Vashtar" has already been discussed in "Inexorable Child-logic".
6. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, p.294.
7. See footnote 5 above.
8. "The Music on the Hill", p.161.
9. Don Henry Otto, 'The Development of Method and Meaning in the Fiction of Saki' (Unpublished dissertation, University of Southern California ,1969), p.121.
10. One of six previously uncollected stories in A.J. Langguth, Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981).  All page references prefixed by 'L' refer to this work.
11. Langguth calls him Revil Yealmton.  The name appears only once, and with the initial letter somewhat indistinct in the microfilm version, at the very beginning of the story in Morning Post, May 6, 1913, p.5.  Reference to the original shows that the initial letter is in fact 'B'.
12. This has the same force as "'Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar'" (p.138).
13. "The Sheep had definitely disappeared under the ice-rift" (p.513).
14. "He saw the Woman enter [...] and Conradin fervently breathed his prayer for the last time" (p.139).
15. "The Woman indulged in religion once a week at a church near by" (p.137).
16. Auberon Waugh, "Introduction", The Chronicles of Clovis, 1986, p.x: "The God Pan in 'Music on the Hill' is a vengeful, threatening deity."
17. Loganbill, 'A Literary and Critical Study', in his chapter on Ethics, p.98, states: "there is only one theme in Saki", about sowing and reaping.
18. The parallels of plot between "The Interlopers" and "One of the Missing" by Ambrose Bierce are discussed by Ronald Hartwell in "Fallen Timbers - a Death Trap: a comparison of Bierce and Munro", Research Studies of Washington State University, 49 (1981), 61-66.
19. As Loganbill puts it, this is a story about the "disgusting nouveau riche made fools of by forces of invisible reality in this case the supernatural" (p.146).
20. This has an echo in The Unbearable Bassington (p.636), in the discussion of the portrait of Francesca Bassington: "'What a curiously unequal style the artist has [...] Francesca [...] is quite the most soulless woman I've ever met.' The likeness was undoubtedly a good one, but the artist had caught an expression in Francesca's eyes which few people had ever seen there".
21. Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction : "The dog is frequently the subject of occult fiction" (p.290).
22. Loganbill (p.146), states that "the final twist is administered by the imaginative Conrad with his newspaper notice", deducing from this that "Conrad like Mortimer is not such a fool as to disbelieve in things which he sees around him".  If Conrad did insert the notice and not the Baron and Baroness Gruebel then the point of the story is lost, since Conrad never has been deceived as to Amalie's true identity and he is "the one poetically-dispositioned member of an eminently practical family" (p.410) to whom scoring social points is meaningless.  It is not Conrad who cares about the snob value of claiming a friendship with the von Cernogratz family.
23. W.D. Cobley, "The Tales of Saki", Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, 47 ( 1921), 231: "He returns once more to his conception of the farm as so apparently remote, so still, yet actually so great a centre of far flung activity in the endless processes of reproduction in bird, vegetable and beast".
24. A phrase which calls to mind the "high blank wall" (p.423) in "The Penance" and "the cheerless garden" (p.137) of "Sredni Vashtar".
25. A fleeting moment of unease like Mrs De Ropp's and Octavian's.
26. Scarborough: "The use of portents is a distinct characteristic of the horror romance.  Calamity is generally preceded by some sign of supernatural influence at work, some presentiment of dread" (p.39).
27. Cobley (p.231): the "stranger's lack of reverence for country manners and customs rendered venerable by the passage of time".
28. Drake, "Saki's Ironic Stories", Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 5 (Autumn 1963), 380: "the irony in this story seems almost unbearable on the first reading".
29. The choice of the word, "imposed," is a subtle one with its implications of deception and taking advantage.
30. A picture which also conjures up Martha's "white, unheeding face [...] peering out through those latticed panes" (p.270), in "The Cobweb".
31. Like Nicholas's "aunt by assertion" in "The Lumber-Room".
32. In "The Music on the Hill" (pp.165-66) and "The Interlopers" (p.450) respectively, similar to "the qualms" felt by Emma, Mrs De Ropp and others.
33. This same fleeting moment of relief features also in "The Music on the Hill" in the instant before Sylvia learns the awful truth, and in "Gabriel-Ernest" just before Van Cheele's second encounter with the werewolf-boy.
34. The significance of the oak tree has been discussed in the previous chapter, page 23.
35. This phrase: "white set face" recalls both "Sredni Vashtar" and "The Penance".
36. V.S. Pritchett, "The Performing Lynx", New Statesman and Nation, 53 (1957), 18, talks about "the drama of incurring another's fate".
37. Drake, 'Theme and Rationale in the Short Stories of Saki' (Unpublished dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1953), p.80: "He is blinded by his own conviction that this is a day of science and sanity; there are no such things as werewolves."
38. Scarborough says: "in recent fiction the werewolf is represented as an involuntary and even unconscious departure from the human, who is shocked when he learns the truth about himself" (p.172).  This is patently not the case with Gabriel-Ernest who relishes his dual role, a fact which tends to reinforce the view that this use of the Supernatural is a device to shock.
39. The Tory newspaper of the day, and the precursor of the Daily Telegraph.
40. To be discussed in "Elaborate Futilities".
41. Drake, p.82, "the chief dupe, although he becomes cognizant too late, is not made to suffer himself".
42. Sentiments similar to The Unbearable Bassington where "Francesca was, in her own way, fonder of Comus than of any one else in the world" (pp.588-89).
43. Joan Aiken in her "Introduction" to The Unbearable Bassington (London: Oxford University Press, 1984), p.  5, talks of "a powerful sense of predestination, of fatalism.  Wherever his characters go, however they act, nothing is really going to affect the ultimate outcome for them; destiny is bound to overtake them".
44. Winston Churchill, Lord Curzon of Keddleston, Lord Hugh Cecil.
45. The Society for Psychical Research, founded 1882, to explore spiritualism and the realms of the supernatural.
46. Lady Cullumpton also features in "Mark" (p.473), as the title of a mythical book: The Reluctance of Lady Cullumpton.
47. Which calls to mind Van Cheele's self-importance in "Gabriel-Ernest".
48. A joke modified from "Reginald's Choir Treat": "she had been twice to Fecamp to pick up a good French accent from the Americans staying there" (p.17) and improved upon in "Adrian": "'And be surrounded by Americans trying to talk French? No, thank you.  I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French.  What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English'" (p.142).
49. This same joke occurs almost verbatim in The Watched Pot, Act 1, p.867: "'She was born taking people by surprise; in Goodwood Week, I believe, with an Ambassador staying in the house who hated babies'".  The exchange in "Laura" which follows: "'Insanity? No, I never heard of any.  Her father lives in West Kensington, but I believe he's sane on all other subjects'" (p.243) may be compared to The Watched Pot, p.889, "'Madness, no.  Oh, no.  At least not that one knows of.  Certainly her father lives at West Kensington, but he is sane on most other subjects'".
     
    The dialogue of "Laura" at this point has a certain feel of contrivance about it which may be explained by the surmise that Saki in failing to achieve the staging of his play (first written in 1905 according to James Redfern in his review of it in the Spectator, 27 August, 1943, p.194) seeks to reach a wider audience for his jokes.
50. In Octavian's case his "soul's peace depended in large measure on the unstinted approval of his fellows" (p.422).
51. An echo of the views expressed in "Sredni Vashtar" about the making of toast, p.138.
52. An episode which calls to mind "Reginald's Choir Treat", p.18.
53. To be discussed in "The Realms of Fiction".  Saki seems to have a curious aversion to plump men, equating plumpness with complacency and ineptitude.  Van Cheele in being described (p.69) as going "at a speed for which he was scarcely geared" might be assumed to be plump, while Waldo Plubley in "A Touch of Realism" (p.304) is "a plump, indolent young man".  The odious Leonard Spabbink is variously described (p.230) as a "flabby, redundant figure", "like an ice-cream that has been taught to beg" and "pettish" and "self-satisfied".  The complacent pigeons in "The Image of the Lost Soul" are also plump as is the Baroness Gruebel in "The Wolves of Cernogratz".  Thus the formulaic nature of Saki's work acts as a kind of code.
54. A similar accident rescues Rex Dillot from ignominy in "Fate", p.486.
55. "Furtive" and "furtively" are favourite words in these supernatural tales, occurring several times: " Amanda looked quickly and furtively" (p.244); Groby Lington made "a furtive downward grab" (p.227); Martin Stoner paid a "furtive visit" (p.197); the children in "The Holy War" are denied "a furtive slide" (L.p.292) and in "The Music on the Hill" there is "furtive watchful hostility" (p.162) and a "furtive sinister 'something'" (p.163).
56. "A man disguised as a Captain yesterday led a detachment of soldiers from Tegel against the Town Hall of Koepenick, had the mayor arrested, robbed the safe and drove off in a horse-drawn cab." (Translated from the German in the "Introduction" to Der Hauptman von Koepenick by Carl Zuckmayer,[Munich: Fischer Verlag, 1983]).  The man's name was Wilhelm Voigt and he was to be the subject of a celebrated play, which first appeared in 1931, and was later made into a film.  The incident was reported in the Berlin newspapers of 17 October, 1906.
     
    The verb to "koepenick", which Saki defines thus: "to replace an authority by a spurious imitation that would carry just as much weight for the moment as the displaced original" (p.215), is obviously a topical allusion to this bold impersonation which must have made the headlines of the English newspapers of Saki's day.
57. This word occurs several times with ironic effect: in "'Ministers of Grace'", "in response to the scandalized shouts of his opponents" (p.221); twice in "The Remoulding of Groby Lington", "the servants [...] were scandalized to find" (p.226) and "'worse was to follow', as she remarked [...] to a scandalized audience" (p.227); in "Laura", "'I think she might at least have waited till the funeral was over', said Amanda in a scandalized voice" (p.244); and in "The Wolves of Cernogratz": "'it was an impertinence,' snapped out the Baron, his protruding eyes taking on a scandalized expression" (p.411).  In each case it is the superficial, trite response which is being mocked.
58. Just as no man is a hero to his valet.
59. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, p.45.
60. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (London: Penguin, 1982), p.51.

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